Emailing on the Go

There are many business-related or personal reasons that can take you away from the office during the day. You can still keep up with your voice messages with mobile phones, but you can quickly fall behind on emails when you're on the road. And even though you can use the email account on your smart phone to receive mail, you'd prefer to send and receive emails from the business account printed on your business cards.

Here are some options to keep up with your office emails while you're on the go, while making it look like you're still sitting at your office computer.

Mail forwarding

This is a great option if Back2Front hosts your @yourcompanyname.com email address, while you also have a mobile email address, like @blackberry.net. We can forward your emails to your mobile account.

Steps

Send us an email at support@back2front.ca and tell us which @yourcompanyname.com email addresses you would like pointed to your mobile email address. Remember, Back2Front offers unlimited email forwarding, so you can have as many email addresses as you'd like forwarded to your mobile account, or even create a specific email address to be forwarded. By completing this step, your mobile device is ready to receive emails sent to your business address.

The next step is to turn off the tell-tale "sent from my mobile device" messages and to customize your email signature to look as if you're sending it from the office. How you accomplish this depends on the kind of phone and the application you're using. Refer to your manual or technical support representative to learn how to accomplish this on your mobile device.

Webmail

If you don't have a mobile mail client, you can still access our email on the go if you can launch a browser on your mobile device. Just navigate to your personal webmail portal and login using your credentials. (If you've forgotten this information, simply email us at support@back2front.ca and we'll send it to you.)

Once logged in you can view and send email. Customize your email signature on the online interface by clicking Options > Mail > Personal information. If your email is not hosted by Back2Front, it is still likely that your email provider offers webmail access too. In that case, open a support ticket at your provider's web site (or email them) to receive your login information.

Webmail is great for checking an individual email account, but it lacks the ease-of-use that email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird allow for checking multiple email accounts from the same location. This is an important feature for individuals who prefer to send and receive emails from different accounts. Signing in and out to multiple email accounts on your mobile device can be tiring, so consider online mail clients if this is your practice.

Online mail clients

Online email clients like Mail2Web bring the functionality of email clients like Outlook to the web. These services allow you to link multiple email addresses under one account.

Currently, my favourite online email client is Gmail. You can use an existing email account (or create a new one) to manage your multiple email addresses. I prefer Gmail because it is free to use, easy to set up filters to sort emails from my different accounts, and my business emails are backed by their reliable servers and efficient spam filtering. Gmail also provides apps for mobile devices making it convenient to review your emails even after turning off your data connection.

Steps

Log into your Gmail account and click "Settings" in the top right hand corner.

On the Settings page, click the "Accounts and Import" tab and fill in the required information. Remember, you can email us at support@back2front.ca if you forget the details for your email account.

Be sure to select the option "Reply from the same address to which the message was sent" to ensure the appropriate "from" address is displayed to your recipient when you reply to messages.

This is all you need to do to start sending and receiving emails. When you compose emails, an option box next to the "from" field on the message window allows you to select which account you'd like to email from.

To organize your inbox further so that you can view emails from each account separately, follow these steps:

On the settings page, click the "filters" tab.

Create a new filter to sort your incoming. In step one, enter your receiving address in the "to:" field. Then in step 2, select "apply a label" and create a unique label to describe your account.

Repeat these steps for each email account.

To view emails associated with one account, just click the corresponding label from the label list.

With these options, you can catch up on a few emails during your morning commute, while waiting in a line-up, or any other scenario that allows you the time to safely look at your device. Just remember to turn it off at family dinners and during your vacation.